The day before Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, I interviewed the much-garlanded Israeli novelist David Grossman. We were talking about refugees and he said something that stayed with me. We tend to see refugees, he said, not as individuals but as a vast, undifferentiated mass. Packed into a dinghy, say, or crammed into a holding centre. “We see them looking miserable and noisy and dirty. Just to make the effort, the 30 seconds effort, of putting these men in a shirt like yours, having an apartment like yours, having friends, having his life, his job, his love, his respect for his parents, his caring for his children, all these small things and suddenly, you will not be able to deny him any more … I think the way to solve the problem of the immigrants, the way to integrate them into their life in new places, is this way of looking at them, which will allow them to regain their dignity.”
At its most basic, Martin Sherman’s Rose makes this effort of the imagination. It plucks a single person, a single life, from the turmoil unleashed in the last century and forces us to listen to that single story. Rose is someone who would otherwise be ignored. She’d either be a statistic, lost among the displaced millions scattered by the second world war, or a batty old lady on the Florida coast, unseen by the young and beautiful gathered on Miami’s South Beach. This play forces us to realise that even the most invisible among us, even a cranky old lady popping pills, once lived a vital, individual life.
And what a life. It spanned the Jewish twentieth century, surely the most eventful epoch in Jewish history since the age of the bible. Rose witnesses – and survives – Russian pogroms, the Warsaw ghetto, the Jewish underground, the voyage of the doomed Exodus ship, the birth of the state of Israel, the postwar embrace of the United States that led Jews to hail that country as the goldene medina, the golden land, the Six Day War, the Lebanon war of 1982 and the rise of the West Bank settler movement. True, sometimes Rose’s experience of those events is fleeting or indirect: she brushes her lips against the soil of pre-1948 Palestine on a visit that lasts just five hours. But her life encompasses the entire dizzying era, from darkest tragedy to a redemption that is never as simple as that word suggests.
When Rose debuted in 1999, it might have been tempting to view it as an extended epitaph, a full stop on that turbulent century. Perhaps this was Sherman’s attempt to wrap up both the despair and triumph of that period, readying it for burial along with Rose herself. But events have not allowed Rose any such rest.
For one thing, the antisemitism that stalked Rose’s life, and which left such a bloody mark on the middle of the last century, has woken from its slumber. (As the historian Robert Wistrich wisely remarked, antisemitism has always been a light sleeper.) Even in Britain, where Jewish life remains vibrant, the number of antisemitic incidents monitored by the Community Security Trust increased by more than a third in 2016 to reach the highest level the CST had ever recorded.
More shocking is the state of the US, Rose’s goldene medina, the land so welcoming it let Yiddish enter the language: as Rose recalls, “schmuck and schlep and schmatte and schmooze and chutzpah.” There, in a twist that few ever saw coming, the White House now stands accused of a musty prejudice against Jews. First, there was a statement for Holocaust Memorial Day that managed not even to mention antisemitism or name Jews as victims of the Nazis, suggesting Jews were just caught in the crossfire of war rather than singled out for eradication – a statement, incidentally, that was rapturously received by America’s neo-Nazis. Then there’s the eminent perch occupied by Steve Bannon, chief strategist to Trump, who was proud to call his Breitbart website “the platform for the alt-right.” More recently came the dismissal of presidential aide Sebastian Gorka, amid accusations of links to far right, racist and anti-Jewish groups in Hungary. Gorka denied those claims, but that he even got through the door of the White House has led US Jews to feel an unfamiliar anxiety – one they associated with the cold lands Rose left behind.
Perhaps those who saw the play in 1999 thought that the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians might also be consigned to the history books some day soon. After all, the two sides had signed the Oslo accords six years earlier. But in 2017 the world’s most intractable conflict remains exactly that.
Rose articulates a position that will resonate with many millions of Jews in Israel and around the world. For one thing, she is intimately connected with the country: she has children and grandchildren there. She can’t help but see its establishment in 1948 as a dream fulfilled, a haven made necessary by the most murderous persecution. But she also laments the consequences of the military victory in 1967, the acquisition of lands that have made Israel a sometimes brutal occupier. The change in her once promised land saddens her: “The milk was slightly sour, the honey a bit tart.”
This is not history. This, sadly, is a story of the present day. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank – which began when Rose was a late blooming hippy in beads, incanting Buddhist mantras – will be fifty years old this summer.
And if that makes this play eerie in its timeliness, then surely the story at the heart of Rose makes it all the more resonant for 2017. For Rose is a refugee: one of that undifferentiated mass we see on today’s TV screens, that we saw on the poster promoted by Nigel Farage during last year’s referendum campaign under the slogan, “Breaking Point”, that we saw turned away by Trump’s travel ban. Each one of those millions currently on the move will have a story as bitter, as sweet and as human as Rose’s. They won’t get a night at the theatre. But if they did, each one would have a story to tell.
Jonathan Freedland is a columnist for the Guardian
Rose can be seen from Thu 25 May – Sat 10 Jun. Find out more and book tickets here.
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